Yanira Bernice Valderrama Cuts Deal for Drowning Newborn in Toilet and Tossing Him in Trash Bin

A 21-year-old Fullerton woman has pleaded guilty to felony child abuse in a deal with prosecutors that removes a murder count for drowning her newborn boy in a toilet and hiding his body in a bedroom trash can.

Yanira Bernice Valderrama also admitted to a sentencing enhancement of inflicting great bodily harm.

Speaking of sentencing, it's unclear what kind of punishment Valderrama faces at a scheduled Oct. 21 hearing in Santa Ana. With the murder count, she was looking at the possibility of 15 years to life in state prison.

Fullerton Police detectives believed Valderrama hid her pregnancy from her parents, who the then-19-year-old was living with on Sept. 4, 2009, when she gave birth to a baby boy in her bathroom around 10 p.m.

According to prosecutors, when Valderrama heard her mother trying to enter from a connecting bathroom, the teen stuffed her baby in the toilet until her mom left. She is accused of then wrapping the newborn in a t-shirt and tossing the little bundle of joy in a bedroom trashcan. Valderrama went on to expel the placenta, hiding it under the bathroom sink.

Later that night, Valderrama's mother walked into the same bathroom, saw large amounts of blood and called 9-1-1. Paramedics took the teen and the placenta that mom found under the sink to Anaheim Memorial Hospital. Doctors examined Valderrama and determined that she had just given birth and alerted police.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.